Indoor air pollution from New Zealand’s 523,000 wood burners was estimated to account for 446 hospital admissions for heart and lung problems, and 101 early deaths annually, in a country with a population of just over 5 million people. Breathing fumes from gas cooking indoors created more than 1,000 hospital admissions, 208 early deaths and more than 3,000 new cases of childhood asthma each year.
Wow didnt realise we had so many people using wood and gas burners still.
Wood burners are sought after because of the radiant heat vs a heat pump (you can get this from many things, but people associate it with wood burners).
Gas is still considered fancy for cooking. People still install gas hobs.
It helps that gas is the only way to get continuous hot water systems, which people are getting installed while I’m here hating it and working on getting off gas.
I’ve got both actually, a wood burner and a gas stove run off 9kg bottles.
Wood burners are extremely cheap if you collect your own wood, and people just give shipping pallets away. Ours also has a wetback, so heats water as well.
Yeah I love sitting by a fire by won’t have one in my house due to the reasons in the article (previous numbers I’ve seen are an order of magnitude higher than this article, but those numbers also considered the affect of those outside the home).
But yeah, if you’re not paying for the wood then a small number of people with a tree, a chainsaw, and a wood splitter can knock out a year’s supply of wood for multiple households with just a day’s effort.
I lived in a neighborhood where a bunch of people used wood stoves for secondary heating and there were definitely certain days where it was overcast and humid and there would literally be a smog layer over the whole neighborhood and my asthma would go nuts. I hated that shit and begged my immediate neighbors to not burn wood and they looked at me like I was asking them to cut off an ear.
I think something similar was mentioned in America and then people started complaining about taking away the gas cookers and started buying more?
The prevalence of gas burning stoves in the U.S is caused by a long-running propaganda campaign from the gas industry. If you convince someone that cooking on a gas stove is inherently better than using alternatives, then you will make sure that they install gas lines into their building, making it likely that they will use that gas for heating, which is where the majority of gas consumption will happen.
Once the health effects of burning stuff inside your home on the regular were getting studied and action was close to being taken, more money was given to the right wing politicians, who are never reluctant to jump on any culture war topic, meaning that using gas stoves was now a virtue signal for right wingers.
Yeah. Curious if this will cause a pro gas culture war in NZ too.
Not as much as pro wood burner would be.
Weirdly enough, a modern wood burner is a lot better than a gas stove. I guess because the fumes are immediately vented outside?
Live in a place like Heretaunga Hawkes Bay where in winter you get very still nights with a pocket of really cold air that traps the smoke from wood fires from dispersing and its pretty apparent just how polluting using wood to heat homes can be.
At times in winter a 15 minute walk from town to home and your clothes will reek like back in the old days of smoking ciggies inside in pubs.
Un insulated houses and businesses which refuse to close their doors when the weather is cold are a bigger problem.
I really find those numbers hard to take seriously, 53k per annum is almost the median wage. And almost 10k for each household that cooks with gas? Bollocks.
The health impacts of extra air pollution breathed in each house with a fire led to an annual cost of around NZ$53,400 (£23,000) to the New Zealand healthcare system and economy.
It’s the cost to society, I.e. the public health cost to treat people with problems caused by these things, probably includes the loss of GDP from those who can Bollinger work.
It’s right there in the text your quoted.
